Nope: Elizabeth Warren says the government shutdown was about birth control

posted at 9:21 pm on July 15, 2014 by Mary Katharine Ham

“Remember last year’s government shutdown that nearly tanked our economy?” Warren asked. “That fight started with a GOP effort to hold the whole operation of the federal government hostage in order to try to force Democrats and the president to let employers deny workers access to birth control.”

“Well, we rejected the hostage-taking. Democrats said ‘no.’ The president said ‘no.’ The American people said ‘no’ to this offensive idea.”

The government shutdown occurred over a continuing resolution to fund the government since no budget could be agreed upon. Republicans used the opportunity to try and defund Obamacare.

Republicans were upset over the Obama administration’s selective enforcement of certain provisions in ObamaCare. The main problem the GOP had at the time was the announcement of a delay in the employer mandate.

Warren appears to be getting her claim from a 2011 Huffington Post article, which said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the House would not vote for any spending bill containing funding for Planned Parenthood.

But that was 2011, and the government shutdown was in 2013.

For that, we have to go to another Huffington Post article that said Republicans voted on a bill that would delay much of Obamacare for one year, including the so-called conscience clause that was at issue in the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision.

Ace points out this isn’t the first time Warren has spun this tale. Back in 2013, at the time of the shutdown, she was saying the same thing because the entire strategy for this great, fresh intellectual hope of the Democratic Party is to yell about how no one can achieve anything outside the collective, and unless the collective provides every single necessity for basic living, free of cost, we are cast into the darkest of ages. It makes no difference to her that birth control was readily available to everyone, subsidized and provided free by the government, and covered by almost all employer-based insurance plans before a bureaucrat at Health and Human Services decided to force every employer in America to provide it without a copay, regardless of their religious beliefs. It was even available to Hobby Lobby employees before the Hobby Lobby case was decided and will remain available to them after that decision.

But no matter. This utter nonsense is what’s important. Here she is in 2013 explaining that the GOP thinks eliminating the birth control mandate in Obamacare is the most important thing in the world even though there’s no way you could argue that was central to the discussion. Yes, you can find discussion of it, but it was not nearly the driving force behind the shutdown. From Warren’s point of view, it is obviously of the utmost, sacred importance that this mandate be law, lest we go back to a time (circa 2010?) when women were incapable of getting birth control. So, with that in mind, I have a question for Sen. Warren. If this law is essential to escaping the crushing force of the patriarchy and preserving modernity, why didn’t Democrats put it in ObamaCare? It’d be just as disingenuous and, frankly, more substantiated to argue that the absence of the birth control mandate from the text of ObamaCare—it was added after the fact in one of the thousands of blanks left for unelected regulators—means Democrats who crafted the law from start to finish were bent on limiting women’s access to birth control. After all, they very explicitly did not make it a law that every employer provide free birth control when the power to do so was in their hands. That action is equivalent to turning back the clock on women to a time when birth control was prohibited. Or, so I’ve heard.

Exit video: Just because.

Correction: I changed Ashe Schow’s first name to the correct spelling.

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She disgusts me. She lies and needs to be called a liar; not that she misspoke as Pelosi’s staff said about her after she claimed the SCOTUS decision outlawed birth control. It is time they are routinely called what they are, liars.

Many thought it would easier to run against Obama than Hillary. Don’t make the same mistake with Warren. She is dangerousand I firmly believe she is more dangerous than Hillary. The lofo voters only hear the class warfare schtick and the far left views her as one of theirs. She also has a lot of money backing her – the same that backed Obama.

That would be a great follow-up question (if there really were a thinking, independent press.) “If the government shutdown was about birth control, why did they barricade the national memorials and parks?”

In April 2012, the Boston Herald drew attention to Warren’s law directory entries from 1986 to 1995, in which she had self-identified as having Native American ancestry.[54][55] Because of these entries, Harvard Law School had added her to a list of minority professors in response to criticisms about a lack of faculty diversity. Warren said that she was unaware that Harvard had done so until she read about it in a newspaper

My very liberal mother gets all of her “information” from leftist sources

ITguy on July 16, 2014 at 9:22 AM

My sympathies

darwin on July 16, 2014 at 9:26 AM

Thank you.

My parents and siblings are all “progressive” Democrats. That’s the environment in which I was raised, and I feel quite a bit like “Neo”, who had his eyes opened for the first time to see the truth, while they are all still living in the Matrix with their eyes closed.

I am starting to beleive the democrats have a real 2016 problem on their hands. The more Warren talks the sillier she sounds. The good ship Hillary is clearly taking serious water. Who else is out there who we haven’t heard about to run for the left? Despite 2016 being a good year for the democrats in the Senate, it the head of the ticket is dragging it down it will certainly help the GOP defend the number of seats that are up.

We often wonder why our elected officials are so out of touch with the rest of the country. Well Elizabeth Warren answered that question, what she said is total insanity, but in Washington DC insanity is considered normal. It’s about time that we start electing sane people to run our government.

Like Barack Obama, Liawatha is little more than a sociopath…fully believing not only in the fascist agenda, but that the ends always justifies the means.

She will shamelessly say / do anything to further her own career and the fascist agenda regardless of the veracity of her comments. While not a full-bore narcissist like Obama, the sense of self-entitlement is very strong with this serial abuser of affirmative action.

I am starting to beleive the democrats have a real 2016 problem on their hands. The more Warren talks the sillier she sounds. The good ship Hillary is clearly taking serious water. Who else is out there who we haven’t heard about to run for the left? Despite 2016 being a good year for the democrats in the Senate, it the head of the ticket is dragging it down it will certainly help the GOP defend the number of seats that are up.

Zomcon JEM on July 16, 2014 at 10:15 AM

It’s crystal clear – if Obama’s run on the border does not swell the progressive ranks for the future then the democrats are a foot note in history.

Where do the democrats expect to get the money to pay for their progressive utopia?

We often wonder why our elected officials are so out of touch with the rest of the country. Well Elizabeth Warren answered that question, what she said is total insanity, but in Washington DC insanity is considered normal. It’s about time that we start electing sane people to run our government.

savage24 on July 16, 2014 at 10:18 AM

People – and I use the term loosely – like Obama and Warren, actually go to sleep at night thinking they are right and how dare anyone question their motives.

The government shutdown occurred over a continuing resolution to fund the government since no budget could be agreed upon. Republicans used the opportunity to try and defund Obamacare.

No, it was worse than that.

The Government shut down happened after they tried to shut down Obamacare, failed and then offered to put off the individual mandate for another year, to spare business and employment a catastrophe. Then Obama dispensed with the business mandate, with a wave of his imaginary wand, or his pen or his phone, but the media believed him, and they said you did not have to cover your employees.

Obama could have prevented the pain of Obamacare going off badly in October and November, and he could have prevented the pain of the shut down, but he likes to Punish people.

MK–You know, I was going to say something on the order of “I’m surprised that a person whose profession was teaching law–at Harvard, no less– could live with such intellectual dishonesty” but then I remembered who we were talking about.